


Tended Seedlings, Never Seen

by InkfaceFahz



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Akaashi+Moniwa+Matsukawa Cousins Universe, Classic and Modern Lit Reference, Funeral, Grief/Mourning, Just very sad, Mild Sexual Reference, Monologue, Other, brief alcohol reference, eulogy, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:41:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22302031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkfaceFahz/pseuds/InkfaceFahz
Summary: 31 is young for somebody who mentored you to be the subject you have to condense into a eulogy. But any age is, isn't it. Any age is too early. Shuffle your notes. Feel the eyes watching. Step up. Open mouth.Do Moniwa Kaname's life justice.
Relationships: Aohina if you squint, Futakuchi Kenji/Moniwa Kaname, Moniwa/?
Comments: 1
Kudos: 14





	Tended Seedlings, Never Seen

**Author's Note:**

> Written mostly for personal catharsis.

**Don’t be trouble. You can’t today.**

“You know, when I met Moniwa Kaname, he was shoving that big, old-fashioned metal bento of his at me. I was fifteen, and, I, hated the world. Who doesn’t, then, right? Well, somehow, that bundle of nerves challenged me to more than just a bitter, lazy cynic. He never gave himself that luxury. I figured for a long time that he was one of the only people who got out of their teen years with their soul alive.” 

Futakuchi Kenji was ripping through his notes with his nails as they shook, glancing at the memorial board. Even Kenji didn’t know a lot of the folks who had turned out. A lot of them were foreigners Kaname befriended on business trips. More of them had known him back in high school. How long ago was that? 10 years? 12 years? How was it so long ago? 

“Well.” 

His family was in the front row. The family that Kaname’s mother Eiko, the Takedas, was the eldest surviving member of had been based in Sendai since who knows when. Even the youngest of that generation, a teacher at Karasuno high school still, was beginning to gray, matching his ashen expression as his partner held his hand. Amongst Kaname's siblings, the oldest with a spouse, and a baby, who mercifully slept. There were a few other older people, and he saw Issei, who he’d tried to aggravate in multiple official and practice matches in school, much to Kaname’s chagrin. He looked like twenty kilometers of rough road, still trying to finish a marine biology degree while working to the bone to keep his and his partner’s bakery, Flower Roll, open in Osaka. 

Next to him, stone-faced Keiji, who Kenji graciously -- somewhat graciously -- led his team to a narrow win over at the Interhigh of their third year in an early bracket matchup. Kaname had come watched the match, and somehow maneuvered his way to meet them both as they walked out of the gymnasium, throwing an arm around each, so  _ proud  _ he was, and Kenji saw a genuine soft smile on his steely-gazed opponent. Keiji's own mother was not here. She had died early, too. 

“He was always so proud of everyone.”

Kenji felt the others’ eyes on him and he realized he had said that aloud. He coughed. He was uncomfortable with how many people were here. How many people’s lives could he touch in barely three decades? Someone else should be talking. Please. Anyone. Stop him.

“What he didn't understand, really, was that if he believed you could do something, you would do it. Why?" He shrugged, relying on physical punctuation to let him breathe. "Something just compelled you. He had power almost nobody else I’ve ever known.” 

Kenji’s grandmother spent most of his first year of high school dying. Technical school was how to keep him out of programs that would involve his parents having to waste precious time parenting their poorly-behaved delinquent. He spent the first few weeks sitting by the school gates at lunch. He had enough money to buy a loose cigarette occasionally. He began sitting behind the physical labs building after a couple weeks, because Aone -- Takanobu -- when he wasn’t catching up in a subject, didn’t like spending lunch in such a public spot at the schoolgates. He was shy. Kenji knew he was shy. Kenji also knew he was on the volleyball team, and Kenji furthermore knew he personally had said nuts to clubs in junior high. So he immersed himself in words of the writers who didn’t see themselves as human. Kaname, naturally, presented a complete affront to that idea. 

" _ Hey. How are you liking Dazai? I like Natsume's works a lot, but he’s an earlier writer. ‘Kokoro’ is his most popular, but I like his others. " _

_ "... okay." _

_ "Nakahara's prose is good, too. Have you tried science fiction and fantasy? If you ask for help, the librarian here has a lot of things in translation. Here, could you hold this? And help yourself."  _

_ “You’re domesticating me with food, aren’t you, Moniwa-senpai?”  _

_ "I just wanted my own book. My English teacher said I should try reading more non-technical writing. They gave me these, by that British writer with the stories about the children in another world." _

_ "...'Screw-tape'? But it sounds like a technical manual."  _

_ Moniwa laughed. Futakuchi wanted tell him he sounded nice when he laughs. He instead turned back to The Setting Sun. He felt Moniwa's eyes on him as he read, over and over,  _

_ ' _ I want to spend my time with people who don't look to be respected. But such good people won't want to spend their time with me. _ ' _ ****

_ Moniwa offered to him from the bento once more. “I asked Aone-kun after practice, and he said you don’t eat lunch.”  _

_ “aaaiiigh, he ratted me out? Do I have to come to your stupid club to make sure his big mouth doesn’t talk about me?”  _

_ “Well… I believe you’d be really good if you joined.” _

The notes were shredded. Kenji was building this monument to his senpai, his friend, his… first love and love lost, without a blueprint. He glanced over a group of Kaname’s friends. Adult men who wept, so overcome. One of them, Kenji spoke to, and he promised, the intimacy of his senpai’s closeness to that man would not come up. 

_ “He was very private, you know, outside of people who he’d dated. But I could tell… it frustrated him. But at the same time… I can’t make the decision for him about coming out when he’s no longer got a say.”  _

_ “I understand.”  _

_ “I’m so sorry, I can’t…”  _

_ “I understand.” Nobody so strong should feel so fragile collapsing in Kenji's arms. _

_ “... I. can’t hold him ever again,” the man choked in agony on those words. Kenji’s heart felt like a cinder. _

_ “I know. I know.”  _

_ “I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine how you’re enduring this.” _

The night he picked up the phone and deciphered the tragedy from someone who spoke just enough Japanese in a sharper American accent and he confirmed it with just enough English in a flat Japanese accent, Kenji counted how much paper money he had on hand and bought the most expensive imported bottle of bourbon he could find. Kaname was partial to bourbon and scotch. He drank it like a horse deprived after days without a rest, until in his drunken haze, he swore, he saw Kaname leaning in the doorway, shaking his head. 

_ Not both of us. Not tonight.  _

The bottle was still sitting as a sticky, shattered mess on his kitchen floor when he put on his suit this morning and combed his hair.

“he was overseas for work. The person who called had trouble with the words in Japanese, accidentally said he committed suicide,” he blurted out. “I refused to listen. Just channeled the me I was when we first met. No, Moniwa-senpai, I won't listen!" He smacked the lectern. "So talk to me, dammit!" His hand gripped the lectern like a lifeboat, as he saw Takehito nod to his other surviving club senpai. They agreed he had the capacity for the words. Possibly, however, he had too much. He met each of them with a brief look, and they stayed silent, waiting. 

“He was too good at seeing other people. I remember the last match I had him as my captain, he noticed the most easy to underestimate player on the opposite team, how he had skills and tricks, before anyone else on our team.” He met Aone’s friend’s eyes and saw a quiet dip of the chin, acknowledging that Moniwa had seen him long before many people did in his now-established career. 

“He worked with so many skilled people, as if he was unaware of the skills he brought to the table.” He saw a man in the back with two-toned, long hair pulled back, daubing his eyes under glasses. He was a designer. He was also a former player, who Dateko had shut down and then been shut down by. He clearly had a longer relationship, professional or otherwise, with Kaname than Kenji knew. So many of these people did. So many people who heard a heart arrhythmia reverberate from half a planet away, an unlucky statistic, an acceptance that they lived with uncertainty.

“Maybe people underestimated Kaname next to the kinds of people who wanted to surround him; He was the garden we grew from. He was the gardener who tended to us. Taking on so many projects, so many people.” He cleared his throat awkwardly. 

"He saw I was hungry, and that I lied about it as easily as breathing. god. I can't imagine being the eldest of five. And then it felt like he and my cousin, who managed the club, were parenting a whole team of rough seeming, tough talking teens who… most of us were softer, and more fragile, than we seemed, while he weathered unfathomable challenges. I hoped he'd be able to relax afterwards." Kenji glanced around. Takanobu’s friend had accompanied him, plainly a comfort for him, though Kenji was not quite sure how well he had known Kaname -- only that both of the smaller men had one knack or another for befriending people, so surely, if they had, they had been friends.

"Instead, he became a cornerstone of his family. He was mentoring people half his life, saw things, in them, that he knew they worked so hard to have others see. He worked like every second was an hour. He could be in a corporate office and he wouldn't treat a janitor different from a celebrity or CEO... " god. Kenji was going to fall apart. What did he have. What was still legible on his stupid scribbled notecard. “Tanizaki”. He swallowed his grief whole. He couldn’t just dive headfirst into the realistic solipsism that just led him to, ‘My best friend, my captain, is dead, and everything is worse now.’ 

“ The sun never knew how wonderful it was, until it fell on the wall of a building.” 

Silence. Kenji felt a hunger. He felt a drunken, sloppy kiss from many years ago, Kaname straddling him, his sharp expression melted into a lewdly soft vision so lovely, before switching positions and holding him with gentle strength it took Kenji years to master, wanting to protect him as much as he wanted to make Kaname fall apart in his arms.

_ “You should go grocery shopping more often. How will I make you breakfast?”  _

_ “You should settle down with one of us all ready. I know how many people you hook up with when you’re home. It’s not that we all kiss and tell.” A devilish grin inviting to be silenced with a kiss added, “You’re the one who does that. You’re lucky you’re too perfect for us to be the jealous types.”  _

_ “Oh, stop.”  _

_ The silencer tasted like a mint, ripped open from a leftover business class travel kit amenity, cleansing the bitter runoff of Kaname’s black coffee.  _

_ “But I like traveling for work. I love home. But I love the world outside my home. It’s been so much more. But I’ll always come back.”  _

_ “We’ll always love you here.”  _

_ “I know… I know I’m so blessed.”  _

Kenji wanted to stop. He wanted to escape this moment. Every word he managed to get out to satiate himself made him hunger for Kaname’s unconditional care and love. 

“We will never have the same cornerstone in our lives ever again.,” he said ,his voice going more and more numb, like the onset of the sharp shots in his gums and the nitrous oxide the day that winter Kamasaki and Moniwa drove him to the dentist, waited, and took him home, moaning in pain from his wisdom teeth being extracted. Moniwa had prepared a couple days of meals that wouldn’t wreck his diet plan for volleyball, but were soft, left recipe cards for smoothies. Cared. 

He finally sobbed. This wasn’t the tribute he wanted. But it was the only one he had. 

“He was my friend. He was my captain. He was my senpai. He made me who I am.” 

“Everyone of us is here because, everything is worse now, and we know, he wouldn't want us to be alone.” His breathing stabilized. 

"All we can do to honor him is continue to grow. But I will forever wish he would come back to see what flowers in the garden he made are blossoming for him."   
  



End file.
